just one battles per turn

[Suicide Junkie]

In the B5 mod, supply restrictions would force most common designs to fight only one battle per month. If that becomes a problem in game, the player can simply mount more reactors on the ship...
Of course, in B5 you would be certaily fighting the second battle with a fleet full of partially damaged ships (no shields, all leaky armor)

In standard SE4, a ship can fight at least 4 typical battles before running out of supplies.
I once had a Dreadnought take on 10 lightly damaged enemy dreads, though, and my ship nearly managed to finish off all of them before running out of supplies. Fortunately, reinforcements arrived in the nick of time, and saved the day!

In an evenly matched battle, however, one side would be long dead before the other ran out of supplies.

Running out of supplies in space is much more dangerous than running out of supplies during a ground campaign on a habitable planet like Earth, so ships carry many more supplies that you would expect a comparable ground force to carry

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
An adjustable movement-point cost for executing an attack might be good. However, how do you tell the difference between someone attacking, someone defending themselves from attack, and two fleets that happen to bump into each other while moving around on other orders?

Well, should you make a differance? Wouldn't the combat use up movement regardless of whether you were attacking or defending, or even intended to be involved at all? Just make it an adustable movepoint cost for combat period. Then KlausD can make a mod and set that value to 99 or whatever and will get what he wants. I for one like that idea. Although I don't agree you should only be allowed one combat per month, I can see why it should cost more movement than straight and level flight.

Geoschmo

[capnq]

The fact is each turn of SE IV assumes one month, err I assume it does anyway. Is this in any of the documents?

Each turn is 1/10th of a year; people have gotten in the habit of calling that a "month" for convenience.

[President_Elect_Shang]

Capnq thanks for clarifying that point.

Phoenix-D: “Sarcastically overly detailed.” No, point in fact you are correct and I am sure any physicist would back you. As for me I can’t tell you much about Physics but if you give me your DNA sample (I would need a complete and ACCURATE breakdown of the human gnome) and a full detail history since your time of birth I could predict when you would be sarcastic. Long live Psychology!!

[Suicide Junkie]

Well, should you make a differance? Wouldn't the combat use up movement regardless of whether you were attacking or defending, or even intended to be involved at all? Just make it an adustable movepoint cost for combat period. Then KlausD can make a mod and set that value to 99 or whatever and will get what he wants. I for one like that idea. Although I don't agree you should only be allowed one combat per month, I can see why it should cost more movement than straight and level flight.

The big problem with charging a movement penalty for defending is that somebody can attack you with 10 separate waves of unarmed escorts, and bleed away all of your attack fleet's movement points.

[klausD]

The big problem with charging a movement penalty for defending is that somebody can attack you with 10 separate waves of unarmed escorts, and bleed away all of your attack fleet's movement points. I think you mean if somebody plays simultaneus game, I am right? I never tried this, because I prefer traditional gaming (no surprise )

I like the idea of additional costs of MPs per attack (only in classic turn based) very much. Its better than my "1 battle per turn/stack" thing.

If you want to advance the whole concept a little bit more:

The amount of additional MP cost could be moddable and modified by race advantages and/or technological advances.
If the MP amount for attacking an enemy position exceeds the the rest of the MP allowance of the attacking ship/fleet then the attack should be allowed. (using up the rest of the fleets MP)

Eg fleet A has 6 MP and wants to attack 3 adjacent squares with an enemey fleet in each square. Lets say attacking a normal square with an enemy costs 2 MP. The attacking fleet is 2 squares apart from the first enemy square. It uses up 1 MP for the first empty square then 2 MP for the first attack, then 2 MP for the second attack. Now only 1 MP of the 6 is remaining. The attacking fleet can now attack the 3rd square with the 3rd enemy fleet within using up its remaining MP.

In this matter we can even go further. For example some squares could be more costly to attack than others. (Eg squares which content nebulas, planets, asteroid fields etc. due to more complicated pre-battle plans and astronomical calculations etc.)

And even more, attacks of bigger fleets could be more expensive then attacks of small fleets, due to the fact that coordinating big numbers of attacking ships is more time intensive than coordinating small numbers. This would lead to advantages in splitting up big fleets in smaller more flexible ones (interesting thought)
Again with technology this disadvantage could be modified.

Again this is IMO only reasonable for classic turns not for simultaneous turns (which I dont play and therefore cannot evaluate)

klausD

[geoschmo]

Klaus, I think what others have pointed out though is if SEIV were a true "classic boardgame" style of game, each turn would not be one tenth of a year like it is now. If it were a classic board game style each turn might be more like one day, or to strictly equate it to current terms on 300th of a year. Then each turn you would calculate whether or not a fleet had enough movement to do anything. If a fleet was moving at a speed that would take 5 days to move one sector on the map (About a speed 6 fleet in current SEIV terms) they would only be allowed to move every five turns. A faster fleet would be allowed to move more frequently. But all moves would still only be only one turn. Unless you had a ship that could move more that 30 spaces in a turn which is not possible under stock SEIV, and actually is not possible in simultaneous SEIV at all because of a bug.

Under such a system if on a particular day you could move the fleet, and you moved into a sector with an enemy fleet you would do combat. You would have your one combat per turn in effect.

Such a systm would be very difficult if not impossible to play via email turns against other people, although it might be workable for hotseat, TCP/IP or solo play.

This is in effect what is happeneing during simultaneous turn games now, but you only get to interface with the game and change orders every 30 "turns".

What we have now is not really multiple combats per turn if it were translated into classic boardgame style. What we actually have is that you are doing multiple turns at a time.

Geoschmo